Parrot Pot: IoT rescues lazy gardeners

Parrot Pot will retail for Dh599 from October 20. Flowers sold seperately

Love gardening? A French brand best known for its Philippe Starck-designed wireless headphones and fun mid-range land– and air-based drones may have just the thing for you. For those who are extremely busy and/or forgetful, the Parrot Pot takes care of home plants for you.

Parrot Pot tech

Parrot Pot is a smart pot that automatically waters plants while measuring and analysing the parameters critical to their growth. It’s a wireless autonomous vessel for indoor or outdoor use that is designed to resist difficult climatic situations, including the UAE’s difficult summer months. The Pot has a 2.2-litre water reserve and an irrigation system with four separate spouts.

The 2.2-litre Parrot Pot has sensors for moisture, fertilizer, light and temperature

It automatically waters any plant, regulates its water consumption while you’re away, and provides advice on maintenance. The Parrot Pot is equipped with four sensors that track soil moisture, fertilizer, ambient temperature and light intensity. The data is recorded at 15-minute intervals and uploaded to the cloud for algorithmic analysis every two hours. Based on this, the Parrot Flower Power app (iOS and Android) provides you with advice on how to better take care of the plant in the Pot.

If you’d rather not leave the care of your precious plants in the care of an automated system, the app allows you to set thresholds according to various parameters. For example, the plant is watered when soil moisture drops below 20 per cent or if it’s been five hours since the last watering. Parrot says the app can manage up to 256 Pots at once, perfect for that nursery you’ve always wanted to set up. The Pot is powered by four AA batteries for a claimed year of autonomy.

You can track the data gathered by the plant in the Parrot Flower Power app on iOS and Android

Why make this?

“For several years, Parrot [has] worked for a better understanding of plants and how to use sensors to anticipate their needs,” explains Henri Seydoux, Founder and CEO of Parrot, in a company statement.

“Indeed we too often hesitate [to let ourselves be] surrounded by plants, fearing that they perish, or to acquire a plant we don’t know or one we know is fragile. Parrot Pot answers these fears. Its sensors and smart irrigating system, together with the database we’ve built with botanists and scientists, enable it to handle perfectly the maintenance of our plants, some being quickly affected by an excessive dose of water, some being very sensitive to the lack of water.”

Connected via Bluetooth low energy to your smartphone or tablet, Parrot Pot lets users visualise and take care of their plant via the Parrot Flower Power app. When not linked to the app, the Pot autonomously manages the automatic watering by applying the median parameters appropriate for the majority of plants.

University-tested

The company puts fertilizer where its mouth is. The Parrot Pot’s sensors were tested botanists and scientists at universities such as the Research Center of Wageningen University in the Netherlands and the Center of Urban Horticulture at Washington University in the US. Over 150 Parrot Pots were tested over different periods of time according to various criteria to be studied. Tomato, basil, olive tree, lemon tree and ficus benjamina were among the plants having taken part in these tests. Parrot’s cloud has a library of 8,000 plants, each of which has an ID card with photos, origins, basic needs, practical advice and recommendations (for example, the required type of fertilizer).

Parrot Pot will retail for Dh599 from October 20. Flowers sold separately

The Parrot Pot will be available in the region from October 20 for Dh599 at Virgin Megastores and Dubai Duty Free. Pots come in three colours: slate grey, brick and porcelain. Interested in seeing a Pot in action? Head to Gitex Technology Week, where the French tech brand will also showcase its other new products.

Parrot’s unboxing tutorial should provide a better idea of how Pot works: